Marketers struggle to access data and understand customers, new research reveals.
Despite efforts to make data more accessible to marketing teams, 46 percent of marketers are dissatisfied with the amount of data available to them, and more than half (57 percent) are not satisfied with the effort required to gather different types of data, reveals 3Q Digital’s report, “Modern Marketers: Addressing Today’s Three Biggest Challenges to Growth.” In addition, data that’s more accessible is less influential than data they cannot access, such as desired customer outcomes and marketing ROI.
The report shows that marketers’ perceptions don’t always reflect day-to-day reality. Although 87 percent of marketers believe they understand motivations of their target customer, only 54 percent have successfully mapped their marketing activities to the customer journey. This disparity suggests that marketers are not achieving customer-centric campaigns as well as they might hope.
Structural Challenges
Most marketers (88 percent) also face structural challenges even though, perhaps ironically, most are confident about the effectiveness of their organization’s marketing activities and their own efforts. Two-thirds do not describe their own departments as integrated or efficient, and only 54 percent are able to measure return-on-investment. Marketers can be much more effective with greater integration, efficiency and knowledge on their ROI, according to the report.
“Despite a barrage of information on what they should be doing, marketers are still being confronted with challenges to success,” stated Scott Rayden, 3Q Digital chief marketing officer, stated in a news release. “We wanted to get a clearer picture of our industry beyond our day-to-day interaction with clients, and it’s apparent that the struggle to leverage data, lack of active customer-centric strategy, and organizational roadblocks are standing in the way of growth for a vast number of modern marketers.”
Integration Issues
Other research also shows that reaping potential benefits from data can be difficult for marketers. The study, Context, Commerce and Customer: Best Practices to Exceed Expectations, from the Chief Marketing Officer Council, reveals the difficulty of gathering useful data and integrating it into their technology systems.
“With the advancement of marketing technologies and tools in recent years, marketers have benefitted from greater transparency into the measurement of traditional marketing practices. And while this has helped marketers somewhat, it still falls short of providing a holistic, real-time view of the customer and their interactions at every step of the journey,” Liz Miller, senior vice president of marketing for the CMO Council, stated in a press release.
Some brands now turn to social media monitoring and measurement to augment, but not replace, traditional marketing research. Improvements in social media monitoring and measurement services have placed new market research tools and insights at marketers’ fingertips. Conducting keyword searches of Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other social media platforms produces wide-ranging and in-depth consumer conversations about most any topic. Services such as CyberAlert aggregate the social media posts and use a combination of automated software and human analysts to evaluate the social media mentions and produce reports with useful marketing insights.
Social media listening can also gather information must faster than traditional research – in a matter of hours or days as opposed to months. Many social media monitoring and measurement services can be customized to correlate the social media data with marketing goals and other marketing data, including the value of leads produced and sales generated.
Bottom Line: Although marketers recognize the benefits of data, gathering useful data and integrating and applying information remains challenging. New methods including social media monitoring and measurement can help marketers gather data that is more accessible and glean marketing insights that are more timely and valuable.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
